DevOps World Nice 2018

I’ve recently moved into DevOps as a coincidence. I feel like this is what I’ve done for ages, but I just never set a name on it really. Also, this time it’s proper DevOps I’d say, a team of people maintaining build environments, CI/CD environments, gitlab, and so forth. It’s been a long time since I did proper server maintenance however, and it’s kind of interesting to see what happened. New tools, new possibilities, containerization, monitoring, virtualization, cloud, and so forth.

Because of said circumstances, I went to the DevOps World conference (previously Jenkins World I guess) in Nice and was pleasantly surprised by some of the development done to Jenkins and what they are trying to do. I’m a bit cautious with some of the changes though and what I expect of the future. One of my main issues from work is that a lot of the clients we have are very sensitive about where data is stored, to the point where they set up private clouds to keep stuff in house and in many cases blocking internet access almost completely. A lot of the changes in Jenkins and from CloudBees is about moving stuff into the public clouds from private installations. IE, something that we will not be able to do, even though my company is all for working as open as possible and driving our clients to open up what they are doing as well. There is obviously stuff you don’t want to open as a corporation, but a lot of it is not really specific to you and the help you can receive from collaborating with your competition is actually quite tremendous, hence driving down part costs etc.

So, all that said. I’m super happy to have been to the conference and have heard a lot new stuff. My main takeaways:

Jenkins x seems really interesting, it’s basically a stripped down Jenkins master running in kubernetes/cloud swarm but you spin up a new master for every build so the single point of failure is removed in it, and the kubernetes ecosystem for most of the extraneous systems such as web-hooks, etc. The bad part of this is that you loose the Jenkins UI and Jenkins x is completely Command Line Interface based. CloudBees has some proprietary UI’s for Jenkins X however…

Configuration as Code Plugin seems really nice as I’d really like to easily take my Jenkins Master and create staging environments to test new changes easily. I will be experimenting with this most definitely.

Speeches about breaking down and splitting down your Jenkins Master and basically divide and conquer. Try to do different things on different servers basically, and don’t create a Jenkinstein with almost all the plugins in a single instance to cater to all types of jobs, etc.

Jenkins seems to be moving a lot into the public cloud, which unfortunately is bad for our industry as already mentioned. However, I’m really intrigued by the scaling possibilities that was shown using GCP and AWS for example.

Also, a lot of other good talks.

All this said, I’ve been experimenting with alternative CI and git hosting solutions, which I find rather interesting and I’ll write more about that in a close future…. 😉